Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
-
Leslie Huishan Li
Abstract
In this study, I apply the notions of chronotope and scale in social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis to investigate user interaction on a specific social media platform in China: Xiaohongshu. More specifically, I analyze semiotic resource deployment, chronotope mixing, and scaling strategies in home pages, posts, and discussions created by users who label themselves and are labeled by the platform as doctoral students. This article showcases how interpersonal connections of distance and intimacy are established among bloggers, followers, and discussants, as well as how these individuals represent and negotiate characteristics and statuses concerning the doctoral community. Chronotopes, as time-space-identity configurations, are invoked and deployed as communication resources for interactants to self-present and position themselves in contrast to or aligned with certain memberships and communities. It is within and through accumulated community discourse as such that social meanings, values, and identity performance are constantly (re)constructed. This article contributes both to the application of chronotopes and scales in multimodal discourse analysis and to the multimodal analysis of social media communication with a focus on nuanced semiotic interactions in deference to the doctoral community.
摘要
本研究运用尺度 (scale) 与时空体 (chronotope) 概念, 通过社会符号学框架下的多模态话语分析方法, 考察中国社交媒体平台“小红书”上的用户互动。具体而言, 本研究分析自我标识及被平台标识为“博士生”的用户群体在其主页、发帖及讨论中如何部署符号资源、混合时空体及运用尺度策略。研究揭示博主、关注者与评论者之间如何构建趋近或疏离的关系, 以及这些个体如何呈现和协商与博士群体相关的特征与身份地位。作为时间-空间-身份的构型, 时空体被引用并作为交际资源, 使互动者得以进行自我呈现, 并对于特定群体和社群进行趋近或疏离的自我定位。正是在这种群体话语之中通过这种积累,社会意义、价值观及身份表演得以不断(再)建构。本研究一方面深化了时空体与尺度在多模态话语分析中的应用, 另一方面推进了社交媒体交际的多模态分析, 尤其关注博士群体中细微的符号互动。
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
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- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
